The Instigators isn’t bad enough to be good

Here’s my synopsis for The Instigators, Apple TV+’s messy straight-to-streamer led by Matt Damon and Casey Affleck: After botching an election-night robbery, two dim-but-affable Boston bros (and one of their shrinks) outrun the police as they bicker like they’re in couples therapy. It’s a heist movie on a psychiatrist’s couch. It’s a parody of a heist movie set in Boston. It’s an action-comedy that wants to be a blockbuster that parodies heist movies. 

Whatever this movie is going for, it’s wobbly, and the rivets are popping off as it tries to hold everything together. 

Without being one of the positive adjectives (“genre-bending”) that sometimes get applied to films that have no real Hollywood precedent, The Instigators is hard to categorize. It’s not quite trash or art or “so bad it’s good.” It has the veneer of a high-concept studio film, but it’s not quite that either. What it is is a formulaic buddy action-comedy that’s engineered to perform on streaming (a path trod by 2021’s Red Notice), but it’s not a blockbuster. Red Notice’s 37% on Rotten Tomatoes belied its commercial success as the most-streamed film (in terms of hours) in Netflix’s history. That’s what I believe Apple wanted from The Instigators: critically panned “content” (41% on Rotten Tomatoes so far) with blockbuster populist appeal and memes, which it doesn’t have — nobody is tweeting about this film. It’s not weird enough; it’s not Deep Water.

It has moments where it feels like it wants to be a blockbuster, such as an absurd car chase across downtown Boston, which is briefly scored to Petula Clark’s “Downtown.” But the film’s visual effects are too “made-for-TV,” especially the explosions, and the cinematography doesn’t center Boston the way Michael Bay’s Ambulance (2022) centered driving in Los Angeles. It could have been New York except for the cheesy accents that take you back to the actors’ work in Good Will Hunting. 

Speaking of which: The odd-couple repartee between Affleck and Damon, the film’s comic engine, actually works, for the most part, but it needs to be discussed. How you feel about the dialogue exchanges between Rory (Damon) and Cobby (Affleck) is the deciding factor of whether you’ll be able to enjoy this film. Rory is a divorced father (and unemployed Marine) who needs exactly $32,480 to pay child support so he can see his son. He’s in therapy because he’s suicidal. Rory is repressed and doesn’t seem comfortable being a criminal. Affleck’s Cobby is the opposite: a chatty career criminal and pyromaniac who may (or may not) suffer from “adult disinhibited social engagement disorder.” Cobby spends most of the film trying to make Rory laugh. He never does. (That’s the only spoiler in this review.) It’s an odd-couple story. 

The gratuitous cliches in the film don’t bother me, but the blasé digital cinematography and uninspired marketing made me want to turn it off and instead revisit some of the classic heist comedies, such as Quick Change, which made you feel the claustrophobia of New York, Amos & Andrew (1993), which has an unforgettable poster depicting Nicolas Cage handcuffed to Samuel L. Jackson, Blue Streak (1999), one of the funniest heist films ever made, and Reindeer Games (2000), a Christmas heist film starring Charlize Theron and one of the producers of The Instigators, Ben Affleck. This is the problem with The Instigators: It just isn’t anything enough to hook you. It’s certainly not good, and it isn’t bad enough to become a schlocky cult classic like Reindeer Games. It’s just another movie you can stream. 

Damon and Casey Affleck co-wrote the script with Chuck Maclean from City on a Hill, Kevin Bacon’s gritty Showtime series that revisited ‘90s Beantown — its architecture, its wiseass edge, and its sound. In terms of box-office mojo, Damon and Casey Affleck are still bonafide movie stars (especially Damon). And the supporting cast is a testament to Apple’s deep pockets, which pulled in the Oscar-nominated Hong Chau, who plays Damon’s psychiatrist, Michael Stuhlbarg (the wacky crime boss), Paul Walter Hauser (the cartoonish henchmen), Ving Rhames (the mayor’s enforcer, who drives a tank), Alfred Molina (the crime boss’s bakery owner), Toby Jones as a weaselly lawyer, Jack Harlow as one of the robbers, and Ron Perlman as Boston’s corrupt stand-in for Donald Trump. The talented cast is maestro’d by director Doug Liman, who was unfairly lampooned for his recent Roadhouse remake starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a traumatized UFC fighter, which I enjoyed for the same reasons I enjoy professional wrestling. 

I like Liman. He directed some of my favorite films, including Swingers (1996) and Go (1999), films that defined my generation. Those movies had replay value. We rented them over and over again. The appeal of The Instigators, by contrast, is ephemeral and cheap — something to kill what’s left of the doldrums of summer. It’s a film you can watch on your iPhone without losing anything, almost like something you rented in the ‘90s and left in the box.

Art Tavana is an award-winning journalist and author of Goodbye, Guns N’ Roses and former columnist at L.A. Weekly and Playboy.